


A History in All Men's Lives

by gentle_herald



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 - Shakespeare
Genre: Hal's Internal Monologue, Henry V's Spiritual Anxiety, Multi, Novus Ordo, child prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 09:42:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentle_herald/pseuds/gentle_herald
Summary: Falstaff will arrive with a great bellow: Hal my boy! You incorrigible saint, up and walking. Let’s see how we can corrupt you today! and Hal will smirk. He never drinks as much sack as he seems to, so Falstaff is right without knowing. Falstaff jests about Hal's seemingly endless tolerance and Hal feels the power riding in his hands, the line of his neck, in the set of his face. This is one of the moments that make up for the stress of playing a role and the fear of his plan taking him too deep: the knowledge that every man and girl in the Boar’s looks to him.And the tide keeps coming in, and the lions are all dead.Hal drifts in and out of the Boar's Head.





	A History in All Men's Lives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OldShrewsburyian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/gifts).



> From the prompt Falstaff & Hal: mentorship, drinking, or some combination of the two; what makes it WORK for each of them?
> 
>  _There is a history in all men’s lives_  
>  Figuring the nature of the times deceased,  
> The which observed, a man may prophesy,  
> With a near aim, of the main chance of things  
> As yet not come to life, which in their seeds  
> And weak beginnings lie intreasurèd.  
> Such things become the hatch and brood of time  
> \- Henry IV Part 2, Act 3 Scene 1

Falstaff rarely falls asleep, no matter how drunk he gets. He tells stories instead, while Hal has to count and recite Bible verses in his head to stay awake. But if Falstaff won't sleep, Hal won't: it's a matter of pride. The old man can't see that, can't see past his whiney, nostalgic self-absorption. He has, Hal reflects bitterly, no idea what it's like to test your own strength.  

"He clapped me on the shoulder," says Falstaff in a tone that implies this is a honoured confidence, "and said I'd be great some day. Then next week we were on a ship. Died in the Crusade, you know. A great man. And he took me with him! Imagine that. Said there was no one else he'd rather bring..." 

Garbage. Falstaff has never been off this island. The one thing that Hal can have without appearing interested in politics is intelligence, so he makes a practice of knowing the lives of the men and women around him. When he gets the reports he studies them like saints' lives, then burns them and makes the votive offering to their source: a prayer for silence.  

It's stifling hot in the tavern, the air sticky with spilled wine and sweat and sin. Hal doesn't mind the sin; like the heat, it’s something you force yourself into as much of as possible and then soak in. Eventually, you learn to move, fight, think as quickly as if you breathed cold, crisp, clean air.  A man who depends on his surroundings is not strong.  

If I had another five years, Hal thinks, I would go to Italy. It would mean leaving England and its politics, but the education would be worth it. Father went as a young man, and it didn't enable him to hold the throne any better, but the lesson learned depends on the man. I think I can be a leader of men, but then Father did too, once, before it soured. The trick is to hold them.  

You can't get disentangled from Falstaff, not easily, not without hurting his feelings and sending him into a flurry of sycophancy designed to keep you in the doorway, looking back. Some evenings, when Hal is feeling tolerant or just desperate to prove to himself that his mollifying skills haven't atrophied, he lets Falstaff talk all night. Then there are the ones when Falstaff demands some kind of participation; participation Hal can't bring himself to give. His responses are terse, then, or he plays with Falstaff, making him feel humored, patronized, thoroughly out-witted. Then, with a final jab to Falstaff's self-respect, much like screaming or hitting a wall for the joy of using force, Hall leaves and runs through the streets until he is exhausted.  

This running is a conspicuously aristocratic habit, born of endurance training in armour rather than everyday work. But by the time he needs to run to feel clean, to feel industrious and worthwhile, he doesn't care if he's stared at.  

Tonight, Hal wants to put his head down on the tacky wood of the table and let Falstaff's voice wash over him. He can't do this, though: playing holidays is nothing like a real holiday. His actions may be different, but they are still prescribed.  

When he begins to feel sick and fuzzy with exhaustion and wine, Hal makes his excuses; watches Falstaff's face fall. It isn't safe to be with company when he can't trust his reactions. Why must everyone need him so badly? Falstaff's lewd, indulgent histories want a validator. Father demands a heir; persists in applying guilt. The hell of it is that Hal's plans require him to bear reprimands with a specially hardened heart. The hell of it is that  the urge to obey and be dutiful never quite leaves. Why can't I be young, once? This false youth and gaiety is ageing him.  

 

Hal goes; he doesn't run. He drifts to the stews. The air isn't oppressively hot any more, but instead uncannily warm. It's the exact temperature of his body, and Hal can't tell where he ends and London begins. In the distance, there is the sound of a fight. Closer, a whore's false moans. Alarmingly close, disembodied in the dark near his ear. He must be under a window. Doesn't bother to look.  

He climbs the dim wooden stairs of one of these places. It's a brothel he's rarely been to; no one here should know him. He isn't up for that level of social interaction.  

Off to the right there are tables: men getting drunk, women draping themselves over them, the dull crash of beer mugs. A painted woman looms towards him; Hal isn't sure if she's swaying or he is. Some oily cant about pleasure and its varieties. He must look rich.  

"A boy." This has no context; no roots in her little speech. It’s someone he can fuck. If he doesn't wake up by then, which seems increasingly likely, he can lie inert and let the boy work on him. The madam leaves to bring him a prospect. Hal stands with unidentifiable noise wrapping his head. This is part of your training. What do the female heirs of the secondary families of England bring. How many bowstrings does it take to outfit a company in Wales for a winter campaign. Think quickly. 

The boy is here; he is so young. Sandy hair and a little snub nose and hazel eyes and red lips, but not more than thirteen. Hal is a young rake, but madams don’t usually take his request for a boy – or a girl – so literally. He turns and threads his way towards the door, moving crabwise so the crowd closes on him. When the cooler, dryer street air hits him he vomits, gripping the doorframe. 

 

He is at the Boar’s Head early the next morning. Mistress Quickly is wiping down tables with a whitish lump.   

“Hal! Mornin’, prince!” 

Hal tosses her a winning smile and walks as deep into the tavern as he can: not towards the stairs but the other way, around the corner and to the end of the long, low room. It is cool here but the air is still thick with last night. How many hours has it been since he left? Even Poins isn’t here yet; Falstaff won’t be in until midday. Unlike Hal, he needs to sleep off his sack.   

He’ll arrive with a great bellow: Hal my boy! You incorrigible saint, up and walking. Let’s see how we can corrupt you today! and Hal will smirk. He never drinks as much sack as he seems to, so Falstaff is right without knowing. Falstaff jests about Hal's seemingly endless tolerance and Hal feels the power riding in his hands, the line of his neck, in the set of his face. This is one of the moments that make up for the stress of playing a role and the fear of his plan taking him too deep: the knowledge that every man and girl in the Boar’s looks to him. 

Poins is here. Hal leans into his broad chest and props his feet on the table. Poins is a good banterer like Falstaff.  He is rather more loyal than the old man, if not such a magnetic leader. He can probably be trusted farther than anyone else here, so Hal is willing to  relax in his presence. And he’s fine. Hal lets himself close his eyes. Women are shouting in the street, loud but muffled by distance. The kitchen emits greasy food smells and a clashing. Mistress Quickly's puttering in the front room sends quiet slaps through the open door. Here is a faint beer-smelling breeze, not unpleasant, hardly more than a shift in the air. The room sinks and rises on the inside of Hal’s eyes. He sleeps.  

The heat wakes him, the room a cloud of steam seeping into his skin. It seems to be raining lightly outside, filling the street with vapour.  This does nothing to clear the air. Hal unfolds himself and goes to the door; looks out to the rest of the tavern and the street beyond. 

This weather is setting him on edge. There is nothing he needs to do, no step that wants taking, but still: the urge to move, to work, to justify his existence and assuage some of the unnamable guilt that hits him at blank moments like this.  

When Poins suggests a prank on Falstaff he pretends to hold out, teasing for details: Gadshill, disguises. But really, he has been waiting for this since he walked slowly away from the Boar’s Head last night; since he woke in the rain that does not wash anything away but rather carries it downstream to him.  

 

The fields are tawny brown, still sloughing off their winter skin of snow. The earth is heaving up green things and men pack into the City churches for their yearly thumb-smudged ash cross. There is a special need for it this year, they feel, as the nation is clearly staggering under the weight of some unshriven sin. At Westminster, King Henry attempts to keep the Lenten fast and cannot: he is too weak. This news spreads out into the city like a miasma. John leaps after it, but no amount of threats and dogged source-hunting can put it down. The King is dying and cannot do the one thing that would redeem him and bring grace to England.  

England is drowning. The sea is rushing in over us and we cannot fight for our lives; cannot build dikes. We have already tried, and now the only thing for it is for those who can to tread water, hoping the flood goes down before we tire and die. The hell of it is that we have to wait for the King to die. I can't do anything until then, Hal thinks, and yet with every day he declines the situation gets worse. His weakness invites in factions and taps the very vitality of England. A concrete and a spiritual reason circling each other. This nation is full of noble beasts who bring glory if they're brought down; now, they have turned on the hunter.  

He is walking again. He doesn't want to go anywhere; really, Hal wants to be nowhere, moving, not speaking to people. While he roams he has time to think without being found and real danger to his person is minimal because he never stays still long enough to be recognized. Endless walks are a way to slip away from time, stretch it out or speed it along.  

Hal seeks out his rarely-occupied quarters at Westminster. No one will think to look for him here: no one saw him arrive and he has lit no candles and no fire. He slumps against the door; rests his head on his crossed arms and his arms on his knees. There is a chain of events here that needs to be solidified into a tale he can use, or at least a set of understandings. He will have to wear these as armour when he faces his brothers and his royal father's advisors and – and his dying father. Hal knows exactly what is required, but his brain is spinning, pretending that it is analyzing but really just shrieking: be ready, be ready, this is it. Hal knows exactly what is required, but now when his plan is ready in the fullness of time, the malaise that has settled over England has seeped into his mind. He is overwhelmed by the heavens' movement, the power of what is happening in this palace and what is about to happen to his own body.  

Richard understood that very well, the sanctity of the King's body, but he is so long gone now. In barely more than ten years, the vital, perilous life of his court has ossified into a legend. Now it is used as a banner or a morality tale. The intensity of what has been happening has driven the past away, thinks Hal. By the time I am forty no one will remember what it was like, not even the men who were there. Thoughts of age lead him to John of Gaunt: who was great and revered but who Hal knows mostly as an academic subject. Strange that you should study the statecraft of your grandfather and not his memory out of love. But it isn't really strange at all. We all recede into stories and fame. It is the King's special lot to bear this early, while he is still alive. Richard cultivated that but Father has never become a legend in the slightest, and that is part of his problem. He is a politician not a monarch, not in the truest, highest sense. But then, Richard believed himself the King above all else and was totally ineffective in the basic modes of governance.  

He is dimly aware that this intensity is a kind of fanatic part-playing, that he is approaching the crown like he did tavern life: as a disguise and a role. He knows he should temper this dramatic, self-indulgent instinct and – oh. Richard played the king all his life and died of it. Father has been wrapping himself in a security and righteousness he never truly believed he had, and he is also dying of it. Richard performed what he believed he was, but it was the wrong thing. Father was too true; he never really managed to seem anything more than how he saw himself, and men will not follow a mere man. The problem is that they won't follow a distant arm of God, either; they demand that the king elevate them with himself. They want a place in the tapestry and an idealized man; still a man, but not only that.   

And the tide keeps coming in, and the lions are all dead. Falstaff's jests are tiresome, and that isn't from a surfeit of merrymaking. His own sport with Poins has also lost its savour: at least this cutting off will not break my heart, he thinks bleakly. Though the understanding of what has been on this isle and what has passed away might.   

Glendower and Hotspur are safely dead: we had to kill chivalry and romance for the good of the realm. We are so far fallen. Rebellion and instability are upon us while the high, cadenced nobility of our great grandfathers have died. We are so far fallen and the world is changed and diminished. Father is sinking and the life of the king mirrors England's. Which comes first: the acorn or the oak; the seed or the broom? The planta genista. Does England depend on the king or the king on England? 

So here is what I must do: submit to the sweep of kingship, wear it and fit it to me and then beat back the sea. The wet rot at England's heart will be burned out and my long destiny is coming in on the tide. But not yet, not while Father lives and we wait in crabbed half-life, forced to the corners of rooms by the grossly swelled weight of what may yet come.  _It is right and just, our duty and our salvation._  God will give me grace and strength, the kingship will, for what is it for but to enable the King to carry out what he has been charged to do? There is power in accepting the pattern.  

It is still incredibly painful to rise from the flagstones. See there – a Hal is still crumpled against the door, a ghostly shape in a court lined with phantoms and a nation of diseased memories. He will not rise? Very well. Henry steps away from what he was. He shuts the door tightly on that uncertain boy: he won't be coming back to these chambers. They will be given to Thomas; they are the heir apparent's rooms. He paces down the long gallery, testing the breadth of his shoulders, feeling himself both weighed down and borne up. 

 

There will always be moments when Henry feels his life receding into myth; moments that stand out clearly as highlights in the chronicles-to-come. They will be preserved, polished and set as brass effigies. There will be no space for pain in a scene of joy, for doubt in a scene of glory, for humour in the midst of sacred desolation. Miserere nobis. _For what we have done and what we have failed to do._ Only a little will be remembered, and sometimes the things that have meant the least in their lives.  

At times like these, caught up in the sweep of history, Henry can't help but put on the armour of solemnity and the cloak of cadence. He can see time swirling around him, back to his father, Richard, the Black Prince, Edward III, Edward the Confessor. And forwards, to men like Chaucer but in another age, and to the certainty that  _we shall be_ _rememberè_ _d_ _._ It would be a more human thing to be forgotten and let love only remain, but that is not the lot of kings. Sometimes the moment's demands consume all he is but there is still a little voice left outside; narrating, nudging.  _From this day unto the ending of the world,_ it says, and Henry replies: then call we this the Field of Agincourt. 


End file.
